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"Sybil," said Jeanne, "do you.. do you ever wish you could go outside?"
Jeanne laid part of her torso along the countertops, leaning over to peer down at the floor. Sybil opened an eye in response, looking up at her. Some years ago, a few floorboards in Jeanne's kitchenette had rotted away and she'd never bothered to replace them. Sybil had since grown into the gaps.
"…Maybe," she said. Her voice came from all sides in a unified cacophany. "I can see out there, sometimes. Outside of the apartment, I mean. But it's too dark."
"Mm." That much was true. For a while, Jeanne had been able to stick her head outside, the same she had on that fateful day. The world had changed beyond all recognition since then, but she'd still gained some sense of ease and normalcy by people-watching and seeing the strange forms everyone else had taken on. Over time, though, Sam had consumed most of the block to keep himself from toppling over, trapping most of the apartment building in a maze of roots. The front door, last she'd heard, was like a tunnel to a different world.
Some days, the eternal darkness out her window got to her, and she had half a mind to take a knife and start carving until she could see something, anything. Bad idea, though. Jeanne knew better than anyone else how capable Sam had been as a human, much less how powerful he had become as an otherworldly abomination. Or a Great Protector. Same thing, as far as she was concerned.
"If you could really see outside, I mean, Sybil. Past Sam. Into the rest of Montreal. Don't you think about it sometimes?" Jeanne idly kicked her legs. Somewhere in her bedroom, they flailed weakly, atrophied, against her sheets.
"I guess not," Sybil admitted. Her eye turned downwards, in that way it always did when she was trying to recall a memory. "I think, I must have…" The walls breathed a sigh. "I think someone showed me photos."
Well, of course they did. Jeanne showed her photos, back when her daughter still talked to her. She didn't say as much, to spare Sybil's dignity.
"Yeah? Were they cool photos?" They must have had this conversation fifty times now, she thought, running over the same small talk with Sybil ad nauseum. Jeanne didn't mind so much these days– it was a familiar routine, like eating or sleeping or watching television. Sybil kept her company between the rotating cast of apartmentgoers that visited her, saddled with the ever-present task of making sure people like her didn't just curl up and die like old cats.
"Frightening photos," said Sybil. "I didn't like what I saw. I… I felt responsible, somehow. For all of it."
"Mnnn. Yeah."
The conversation always went one of three ways. The first was that Sybil would remember something pleasant, and they'd get to reminisce on something nice. The second was that Sybil wouldn't remember at all, and they'd move on to something else. The third, of course, was that Sybil would remember too much, and then she'd ruminate on it until Jeanne could redirect her.
Jeanne understood bits and pieces of what had happened, if only because other people had relayed to her what Sam couldn't. Something about Sybil being patient zero and her being involved with the robed weirdos with the planet discs. The details were irrelevant by this point, aside from the parts that left Jeanne rightfully furious and Sybil wracked with guilt.
"Well, I'm not too worried about whose fault it was," she said, simply. "We're all still getting by, aren't we?"
She gripped the edge of the counter in her claws and delicately maneuvered herself off of it. Her body had become weaker over the years, and she couldn't just fling her torso wherever she pleased now. About twenty years ago, Sophie had rigged together some abomination of engineering— a cross between a cargo cart and a walker— that gave her a little more mobility. Miraculously, the thing hadn't fallen apart.
The eye on the floor shut, and another opened on the far wall of her living room, watching Jeanne use her slithering torso as leverage to roll herself out of the kitchen.
"I guess so." Sybil looked down at her, eye narrowed as if by a furrowed brow before relaxing again. "We're all getting by. Somehow."